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Vaughn Palmer: Just as it perfects its corporate fundraising, NDP looks at changing the rules

NDP leader Adrian Dix faces the question of what his party — which has long promised to ban union and corporate donations alike — will do if it forms government.

Photograph by: wayne leidenfrost
, PNG

VICTORIA - Opposition leader Adrian Dix continues an unprecedented fundraising pace for a B.C. New Democratic Party leader, pulling in just over half a million dollars at an evening event in Vancouver earlier this month.

The take from the March 6 reception and dinner at the Hotel Vancouver broke the previous record for an NDP fundraiser, set by Dix last October when he grossed $350,000 in an event at the same hotel.

Both times, the majority of the proceeds were from the business and corporate sector, including industry associations and their representatives.

The tally underscores a major departure for the business and corporate sector, which has not previously opened its chequebooks to the New Democrats on this scale.

It also represents a departure for a party that long refused to accept donations from the sector, other than from small, Canadian-owned businesses that “support the principles and policies of the NDP.”

Later, when the NDP did go after donations from larger corporations, the dollars were funnelled through the backchannel, partly so the party faithful would be none the wiser, partly to protect the donors themselves from retribution by right-of-centre governments.

Even when the NDP began to openly accept dollars from what some party supporters still regarded as the dark side, the take was never all that impressive. For the entire 2009 election campaign, the party raised a grand total of $222,000 from all corporations.

Dix figures he’s done better than that in a single night on at least two occasions. “Just when we’re getting good at it, we’re planning to get rid of it,” he joked recently.

The reference is to the party’s standing promise to ban union and corporate donations alike, if it forms government, limiting fundraising strictly to individuals.

The usual trade-off is to compensate parties for the loss of donations with a replacement stream of dollars from the public purse, scaled to voter support in the most recent election.

Prime minister Jean Chretien did that when his federal Liberal government banned corporate, union and other organization donations back in 2004. The annual subsidy started out at $1.75 per vote and peaked at $2 in 2011, the year the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper began phasing it out.

Dix is a fan of the federal Liberal initiative to fund political parties with public dollars.

“I think it was useful in Canada, the Chretien initiative, nationally,” he told me during an interview late last year on Voice of B.C. on Shaw TV. “We saw in that period some political change that might not have happened if we hadn’t had the funding of political parties.”

Dix reckons the beneficiaries included the federal wing of his party, which bottomed out in support in the 1990s, as well as “the Green party, which might well have not had its eventual presence in Parliament if it hadn’t received some of that funding, and its presence in the political debate.”

Public funding helps entrench political parties by providing money to hire staff, run advertising and mount future campaigns, perpetuating the fragmentation of the political spectrum.

It is also an expense. As an example, here in B.C., the Greens have taken their lead from the Chretien subsidy, proposing “$2 per vote per year for any political party receiving at least 10 per cent of the total votes cast in an election.”

Ironically, the relatively high qualifying threshold would have excluded the B.C. Greens themselves based on their nine per cent of the vote in the 2005 election and eight per cent in 2009. The party did score 12 per cent in the 2001 election that swept the NDP from power.

But even if confined to the two main vote-getting parties, a subsidy of $2 per vote per year would put the B.C. Liberals and the New Democrats in line for about $1.5 million apiece annually based on their average returns over the last two elections. Figure $12 million over four years.

So, would an Adrian Dix-led NDP government bring in public funding for political parties? “That’s something we have to look at,” he told me during last fall’s interview, then quickly added:

“It’s going to have to meet a financial test. Every initiative we have — every one, and this would be included amongst them — has to meet that financial test and be competing against significant other demands. There are going to be things we want to do that we aren’t going to be able to afford to do, because the resources won’t be there.”

The party intends to lay out the specifics of what it regards as affordable in the platform scheduled for release early next month, “then other priorities which we say we support would only go forward if resources became available.”

If the New Democrats do win the election, they could create some breathing room for themselves fiscally speaking, by delegating the matter to an all-party committee of the legislature, including any Greens, Conservatives or independents who win seats in May.

The committee could try to sort out the rules on individual donations, the formula for public funding, and qualifying thresholds for each.

As well as buying time, the involvement of other players would minimize the suspicion that the New Democrats were rewriting the electoral rules to further their own interests and put other parties at a disadvantage.

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